You Got Nothing Coming: Notes From a Prison Fish

by Jimmy A. Lerner

  "Looks like all your property is present and accounted for, Mr. Lerner. Your wallet, belt, tie, pen, and watch will be sent with you on the train. The prison won't let you keep the pen— it's metal— but they might let you have the belt and the watch. The tie and the wallet you can probably kiss good-bye, but they will let you know your disposal options when you get to the Fish Tank."

  I've already figured out from listening to the dawgs on the bench that the Fish Tank is the convict name for the intake processing unit at the prison. Like a boot camp barracks before being sent overseas or to a permanent station.

  "I appreciate your checking this, sir, but what about the money that was in my wallet?"

  The lieutenant lets out a world-weary sigh that suggests he has been here before. Done this.

  "Sergeant, where is Mr. Lerner's cash receipt record?"

  The sergeant immediately bobs down beneath the counter— no slow-playing the boss— and emerges with a pink form and a stammer.

  "Su-sir, I was ju-just getting it when the con started sweating me, giving me shit, slow-playing."

  The lieutenant ignores him, hands me the pink cash receipt record after taking a quick look at it. "Is three hundred dollars the correct amount?"

  "Yes, sir, thanks for your help."

  "Then everything is in order. The funds will be transferred to your state prison books. Now please sign the form and proceed to the holding cell for a strip search." The lieutenant pivots on his spit-shined boots like he's on some imaginary parade grounds and marches smartly (if a bit stiffly) back to the booking area, where an endless stream of new guests arrive with handcuffs and bad attitudes.

  The holding cell is nothing more than a large windowless metal box where up to twelve inmates can sit in airless comfort on one of the three steel benches bolted to the cinder block walls. The fourth wall is distinguished by an ancient toilet and sink. They are so thoroughly rusted and discolored that at first I have no idea what I am looking at. The smell rising from the toilet provides me with the missing clue.

  "All right! Strip, then hand me the jumpsuit." Young Deputy Camel motions me to a bench while he stands guard at the open cell door. He is wearing a pair of those thin plastic disposable gloves that I associate with a prostate check. I suddenly find myself feeling insanely nostalgic for my regular internist's familiar friendly finger up my butt.

  Naked, I reluctantly hand over my orange coverall to the cop— it took me so long to graduate from paper to cloth that I now find myself coveting the orange suit. The deputy's gloved hands squeeze, shake, and caress every square inch of the fabric (searching for what?— a smuggled Cocoa Puff?) before tossing it into a barrel outside the holding cell. I gather the property sergeant won't get to deduct any dry-cleaning bills from my books.

  "All right, now stand up and push your ears forward— leave your glasses on— back and forth." I do my best Dumbo imitation, and when no guns or ninja swords drop from behind my ears, the deputy goes through the rest of the strip search checklist.

  "Lift up your equipment… good… turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks… now cough…" I wait in paralyzed horror for the prostate probe that never comes. The cop just says, "Good. Now stand up, turn around, and open your mouth."

  This doesn't sound good, either, but I suppose it's better than, say, "Kneel and open your mouth," which is what I imagine to be the prison version of "Welcome to your cell." I have watched too many prison movies, because the cop just says, "Take your fingers and rub them across your gums… good… now run your fingers through your hair… shake your head. Now get into your civvies and take a seat on the bench outside."

  A New York minute later I'm back on the bench in my generic blue Men's Wearhouse suit, which no one would mistake for an Armani, even with the label inside. Freddy Shapiro advised me to dress "professionally but not stylishly" at my sentencing appearance before the judge. "You never want to dress better than the judge," counseled Freddy. "Sometimes it pisses them off and they're already pissed off." So Freddy wrote down my size and went shopping for me, billing me only two hundred and fifty dollars for the hour of his time. Which means I really got to wear a five-hundred-dollar suit. But hey, what are old friends for?

  The bench dawgs, of course, go nuts at the sight of a suit— not to mention my corporate-issue black wing tips. Kansas lets out a bizarre yelp of pain.

  "Owwww! Check this dawg out! Hey, bro, you a lawyer or something?"

  "Or something," I answer, which provokes the peanut gallery into action.

  "Muthafucka be stylin'!" exclaims the Bone, who is now inexplicably sporting a clear plastic shower cap over the top of his big Afro hairdo. Then all the tattooed, goateed, chinless, toothless white boys get into the act. They are all in blue jeans and T-shirts. Some of them must have been barefoot when arrested because plenty of jailhouse blue canvas slip-ons are still in evidence.

  "Check out the shoes! Them leather, dawg?"

  "The dude's gotta be a lawyer, know what I'm saying?"

  "Probably had a real lawyer, not like your punk-ass public pretender."

  "Fuck you, bro, I coulda had a fucking real lawyer, didn't wanna waste the money, y'unnerstan' what I'm saying?"

  "You mean you couldn't find no real lawyer who would take an ounce of crank and some food stamps!"

  "Keep talking outta the side of your neck, dawg, and I'll stamp your fucking face into dog food, and that ain't no bullshit."

  "Come on wid it, dawg— I'm sitting here, bring it on down, motherfucker."

  The Bone shakes his shower-capped head sadly. "White boys be trippin'. Selling wolf tickets they can't cash. This old dude here in the suit might be O.G.— know what I'm sayin'? Original Gangsta! Old school! That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, the motherfuckin' O Gee!"

  Following another fifteen-minute flurry of wolf tickets— which I take to mean threats, probably of an idle nature— young Deputy Camel does the chain, handcuff, and ankle shackle routine again. Shouts up to the shotgun cop.

  "ACCESS— EIGHT CONVICTS OUT!"

  Two sets of sliding steel doors separate, and then we are in the parking lot, blinking like deranged owls in the blazing June sun.

  Our "train" awaits. Actually it's an eight-passenger van with NEVADA DEPARTMENT OF PRISONS prominently lettered in black on both sides of it. Another cop with a shotgun watches from an outside catwalk as we shuffle like old men in a dry season toward the train.

  The deputy guides me into the van, placing his still plastic-gloved hand on my head so I don't bang it as I bend to squeeze into the front row. Once again, I am sandwiched between the big blue swastika and the Bone's plastic shower cap. A Plexiglas partition with heavy-gauge metal mesh separates the prison guard driver and his escort from the guests.

  The Bone immediately starts whining.

  "Cain't a muthafucka get some A-condition'? It be hot as a crack ho's mouth up in here!" Both cops and all the dawgs laugh, then we are rolling, chains rattling, cuffs biting into flesh, leaving Las Vegas.

  The dawgs are all barking at once, selling wolf tickets to each other, everyone excited to just be outside, on the move, even if it's only the short drive to the state prison. Whenever the Bone's shower cap isn't obstructing my view, I gaze out the tinted sealed window on my left.

  The neon and concrete of the casinos soon fade to a vast empty sky and endless miles of desert. Feels like watching one's life trickle out like sand from an hourglass. Thinking my life is really over now, that things can't possibly get any worse than this.

  Then things got worse.

  * * *

  I wake up in the stifling-hot van to the curses and groans of the Dawg Chorus. Like a nightmarish desert mirage, the state prison compound looms ahead. Barbed wire, guntowers, more barbed wire, and concentric circles of fences, all topped with swirls of razor wire.

  There is nothing alive. Nothing green, nothing growing, not even cactus. Just the fading desert sun beating down on what appears to be a medieval fortress of blackened stone
structures.

  Six 100-foot-high concrete guntowers surround the outermost fence perimeter. The towers are strategically placed to allow rifle and shotgun coverage of the inner prison yard as well as the surrounding miles of desolation beyond the barbed-wire fences.

  The van comes to a stop at a checkpoint just in front of a main gate formidable enough to have kept the barbarians out of Rome for another thousand years.

  Over the top of the Bone's plastic shower cap I watch as a guntower guard steps out onto a small railed terrace and points a rifle down at the van. Once again my stomach is seized with a sickening iron grip. Or perhaps it is my soul, assuming I still have one.

  Our driver shouts out his window to the checkpoint guard: "Incoming! Eight fish, Clark County!" A moment later the massive gate swings open and we are cruising through the main yard. The van neither slows nor stops for a cluster of inmates who seem to be taking a leisurely stroll along the cement walkway. The convicts simply leap to either side, most of them landing on their feet in the sand and dirt. All of them screaming at the van.

  "Motherfucking fish train!"

  "Hey, C.O., we're walkin' here— that shit's outta line!"

  "That's some fucked-up shit! Damn near busted my fucking grill!"

  "It weren't nothin' nice."

  The atmosphere in the van sinks into a grim silence as we approach a two-story concrete building charred with decades of grime. The building is segregated from the main yard by both distance and its own razor-wire fence enclosure and gate.

  The sign on the gate says, UNIT 7A— INTAKE. I remember reading about the Jews who disembarked from the cattle car train in front of the main gate of Auschwitz. They were greeted by a sign in German that roughly translated as "Work Will Make You Free." Trying to think positive, I reassure myself that no matter how bad conditions are in this prison, it's certainly not an extermination camp. My mind gropes for a positive affirmation, settles for I can survive this— I will survive this! This determined sentiment seems more appropriate to my current situation than one of the affirmations I picked up at a seminar once: "I am a beautiful, intelligent, loving person whom people cannot help but love!" Try reciting that fifty times a day to the mirror in your bedroom.

  Then try believing it.

  The van proceeds through the gate and a small dirt yard containing a dilapidated concrete basketball court, both metal hoop rims twisted into pretzel shapes. We stop in front of the two-story cellblock, the Fish Tank.

  Like all the buildings in the main yard that we just passed, the Fish Tank appears to have been built with limited federal funds— sometime shortly after the Civil War. Blighted, crumbling, the gray walls discolored by broad swaths of brown and black streaks, the Fish Tank resembles a putrefying brick of Swiss cheese, complete with jagged holes in the concrete. Suppurating fissures in the snail-gray walls spew out the unlovely aroma of fresh sewage, suggesting a certain institutional indifference to the benefits of modern plumbing.

  Kansas leans forward to massage the swollen flesh on his ankles where the leg shackles have chafed for hours in the heat. Sweat spills in rivulets from his shaved head down over his neck swastika and onto my right shoulder.

  "Fuck me," he moans. "Fuck me again!" His county jailhouse enthusiasm for the train ride is all but gone. "We're in the jackpot now, dawgs— thirty fucking days of this Fish Tank trick bag."

  In the two back rows of the van the dawgs commence whimpering.

  "Cain't get no store, no yard, no nothin' in the fucking Tank."

  "It's like a supermax lockdown. Worse— don't even get no yard time, no weight pile, no nothin'."

  "We got nothin' comin' now."

  "It ain't nothin' nice," adds the Bone, punctuating the collective discontent nicely.

  Then the van is suddenly surrounded by a half dozen shouting guards in khaki uniforms. The doors are opened and we are yanked out by belly chains and shirtfronts with a disturbing lack of gentleness.

  "UP AGAINST THE FUCKING VAN! HANDS ON YOUR HEADS!"

  I am slammed so hard against the van that the only reason my teeth don't rattle is that my glasses have slid down into my mouth. I clench the frame to keep them from dropping to the ground. I make the mistake of using my right hand to shove the glasses back in place.

  "I SAID HANDS ON YOUR HEAD! ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF OR STUPID?" I get both cuffed hands on my head but not before receiving another unpleasant directive from high above me. There is a cop with a shotgun ensconced in another one of those Plexiglas bubbles embedded in the concrete wall about twenty-five feet over our heads.

  "MOVE AGAIN AND I'LL BLOW YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF! DON'T LOOK AT ME— EYES FRONT!" I decide to study the dirt streaks on the roof of the van.

  After a couple of trembling minutes the guards unchain and uncuff us. Another county jail van rolls up, this one marked WASHOE COUNTY JAIL, and eight or nine more startled fish are roughly hauled out and subjected to a similar welcome.

  All this micromanagement is taking a severe toll on my already challenged nervous system. And my system is not accustomed to dealing with anxiety without my prescription for Xanax or Valium— or at least a self-prescribed shot of Jack Daniel's chased down with a Heineken. Not to even mention my wake-up dosage of Prozac and then for beddy-bye, a near coma-inducing combination of Ativan and trazodone.

  No, my fear now is unadulterated. And I seem to have inexplicably lost all desire to medicate myself. Lost it around the same time I killed the Monster.

  I'm idly wondering if this is what my friends at Alcoholics Anonymous refer to as a "bottom" when I'm shoved from behind and we are herded in front of the steel doors.

  "Lower access!" shouts one of the guards. Two sets of sliding steel doors open sequentially, and sixteen new fish are marched inside the Fish Tank.

  For a moment I'm blinded by the swift transition from the sunlight to the cavernous gloom of the Fish Tank. Like stepping from the light of a dazzling day into the darkness of a movie theater. Except this theater is broiling hot and filled with the stench of sweat, urine, and something worse— the thick oppressive odor of fear and despair.

  Forty cells on each floor, or "tier," are arrayed in a compressed horseshoe pattern around a lower-tier staff office and the upper-tier Plexiglas-enclosed gun bubble. A steel handrail runs around the upper-tier catwalk, probably as a reminder to convicts that there is an unpleasant thirty-foot drop to the concrete floor below. If the fall doesn't kill you, I suspect the fetid puddles of water on the floor might.

  Once my eyes adjust, I spot one of the reasons for the stygian ambience. Most of the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling are burned out. All of the steel cell doors are marked in foot-high black numbers, cells 1 to 40 on the lower tier and 41 to 80 above. A large communal shower stall takes up a portion of the central lower tier, directly opposite the lower guard station and Bubblecop's pod directly over it.

  "Get behind the red line!" Bubblecop screams down at us, angling the barrel of the shotgun down for emphasis. We all step back from the open door of the staff office where a thick red line is painted on the floor a few feet in front of the door. Like mindless moths to a lightbulb, we'd all been drawn to the cool flood of air-conditioning washing out from the door.

  A middle-aged cop with a crew cut, a clipboard, and the approximate dimensions of a fire hydrant emerges from his cool sanctuary.

  "Listen up! Most of you ain't real fish— you been down before— so you know the drill." Here the cop pauses to make eye contact with several of the dawgs from the Group W bench. "Welcome back, dickheads," he says sweetly, flashing a grotesque parody of a smile.

  "Before I give you losers your cell assignments, you're all going to shower— with disinfectant— then pick up your state issue and proceed next door for intake processing. You slow-play me and I will personally fuck you. You horseplay in the shower and you will be shot. Now… MOVE!" We all shuffle toward the showers as if still encumbered by the cuffs and chains, everyone conscious of the Bubblecop with the shotgun.


  "Stop right there… now strip! Leave your mangy-ass clothes on the floor— you'll get them back later." The group striptease is accomplished with much cursing, groaning, and the selling of wolf tickets.

  Then the screaming begins.

  All around us and above us, convicts are standing and shouting from behind their cell doors, faces pressed up against the square glass windows. The spectacle of sixteen naked, sweating bodies has apparently inflamed the current guests, inspiring them to scream out their respective welcomes.

  "Yo, fish! Love your shoes." Please don't let him be referring to my wing tips.

  "Hey, bitch, come on up to my crib when you done— I got something for you."